htc.Workshop November 21, 2008, 2-5pm

Esra Akcan, University of Illinois at Chicago

History of Possibility: The Discarded Cases of German-Turkish Exchanges in Housing

How can the history of the actual, the possible and the deliberately impossible in architecture be differentiated? This presentation will discuss methodological questions concerning what I would like to call the history of possibility, not necessarily as a report of the architectural projects that remained unbuilt, and not only as an intellectual exercise of what might have happened if they were built, but also, as an ethico-political concern that explores why a possibility is prevented from being actualized. These questions will be posed by leading off a mass housing project proposed by the German architect Martin Elsaesser (1884-1957) for Turkey. Elsaesser's inconsequential but evocative project for the Güven housing settlement in Ankara, which set itself apart from the common norms of mass housing at the time both in Germany and Turkey, will be treated as a case study to discuss the multilayered differences and connections between actuality and possibility.